


the hand that thieves

by Origamidragons



Category: One Piece
Genre: Akuma no Mi | Devil Fruit, Amputation, Experimental Style, Gen, Headcanon, Pre-Canon, Starvation, Trans Male Character, fucked up disproportionate punishments for stealing, just a little bit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 09:55:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21847795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Origamidragons/pseuds/Origamidragons
Summary: If he gets caught stealing again, if he loses his other hand, he’ll never be a pirate. Never be anything besides a crippled beggar, pleading for scraps.If he doesn’t steal, he’ll starve.
Comments: 18
Kudos: 141





	the hand that thieves

**Author's Note:**

> content warnings are in the end notes!

The stump still aches.

He knows, in a bitter sort of way, that he’s lucky, or at least not as unlucky as he could have been. There was no infection while the wound scarred over, a minor miracle in itself, and it wasn’t his dominant hand- he can still write, though a half-starved street rat like him has little use for such a skill.

It’s an investment for his future, he likes to think. The one he’ll have if he makes it to adulthood, becomes a pirate, becomes free. If he lives past fifteen.

At the moment, that future is seeming more like a distant dream than usual, dancing teasingly behind his eyes like a fevered hallucination as he curls tighter into the shadows of the alleyway and tries to stop himself from shaking in the desert heat. His hunger is clawing maddeningly at the back of his mind, driving him to distraction.

He’s been too careful, too frightened, ever since he got caught the first time- the punishment isn’t one he can afford to repeat. If he loses his other hand, it’s as good a death sentence as a noose around his neck.

If he gets caught stealing again, if he loses his other hand, he’ll never be a pirate. Never be anything besides a crippled beggar, pleading for scraps.

If he doesn’t steal, he’ll starve.

He’s starving already, in truth. His skin stretches too tight over his bones, and his arms are thin and weak enough to tremble. He can’t go on like this. He’s running out of time.

The street stall just outside the alleyway’s mouth is piled with fresh fruit of every shape and color, bright and appealing against the desert’s browns and tans, and just looking is enough to make his stomach hurt and his mouth flood with hunger. The vendor isn’t looking, distracted with speaking to a costumer as she fills a paper bag with figs.

He sidles out of the alleyway, slowly but not slow enough to draw attention. He has an advantage in that people don’t like to look at him, at his hollow cheeks and missing hand. They turn their eyes away from things that remind them of what they could be, but for some ill luck or cruel circumstance. Normally it makes bitterness churn in his stomach, but at the moment it’s a blessing- none of the passers-by give him so much as a passing glance.

He reaches the side of the stand, carefully placing himself out of the vendor’s peripheral vision, and in a single quick motion grabs up an indiscriminate armful of fruit, and-

-fumbles.

He’s used to having two hands, to do this with. An apple slips, he grabs for it with fingers that aren’t there anymore, and it hits the dusty street with a loud, hollow thud that rings like a gunshot.

The vendor turns, and he can see her eyes already widening as she catches sight of him, can see her mouth opening to shape the cry-

“ _Thief!_ ”

He runs.

The city is a rat warren, all twisting streets and narrow alleys and identical buildings built low and flat and close, and it’s easy to get lost, to lose oneself. He clutches his meager haul to his chest as best he can and runs until his legs won’t take his weight, ignoring the stab of loss every time he feels something fall. He can’t afford to stop and pick it up. The bandages wrapped around his chest are restrictive, digging into his ribs beneath his ragged and sand-stained shirt, making his breath hitch and snag.

His legs are shaky and his breath is coming too fast and his head is starting to swim when he finally lets himself stop, collapsing onto a dusty crate tucked away in an unnoticed corner buried deep between two buildings where no eyes will reach him. He closes his eyes and lets himself drift for a moment, catching his breath, until his head is clearer and his chest aches less.

For all that effort, his reward isn’t much- a handful of figs, some mangos, a bunch of grapes, and something big and yellowish he doesn’t recognize- but it’s still the most he’s had in days. He picks the last up out of his lap, curious, and turns it over in his hands.

It's round, patterned with spirals and covered with irregularly-spaced bumps that make it look almost like a clumsy sunburst. He's never seen anything like it before, but- well, it's fruit, and it looks fresh, and food is food is food, so he lifts it to his mouth and takes a bite.

It's _foul_.

It tastes like something dead and rotten, sour and cloying all at once, and the texture is gritty on his tongue. He gags, and just barely manages to stop himself from spitting it out- he _can't_ afford to waste food, not a single bite, no matter how disgusting it is. He forces himself to chew and swallow with mechanical movements, face twisting.

The rest of the fruit is still in his hand, and the exposed meat of it doesn't _look_ anywhere near as rotten as it tastes. It's a uniform yellowish brown, just a shade lighter than wet sand. The prospect of eating the rest of it now that he knows how it tastes is one of the least appetizing thoughts he's ever had, but- he's still hungry, and he needs these spoils to last as long as possible. Today’s call was far too close.

He chokes the rest of it down, bite by bite. Long after it's gone, the taste and the memory of that sand-grit texture linger in his throat, clinging like bile. He longs for water to wash it down, but there are always guards near the well. He can't go there, not yet when they’re still looking for him. He’ll have to satisfy his thirst later, once night has fallen and it’s safer to move about.

He eats the rest of the fruit instead, taking his time, savoring the sweetness of the juice in his mouth. Prying the grapes from the stem one-handed proves a hassle, so he eats them straight from the vine.

He crushes the last of the grapes between his teeth and feels sated for the first time in weeks.

The exhaustion hits then, finally catching up to him, sinking its hooks into his bones, and he lets his eyes drift shut, resting his head against the alley’s cracked and sand-battered wall. He should take the bandages off before he sleeps, and find a safer place to rest as well, but he can't muster the energy for either.

Between the hunger and the phantom pains, he hasn't slept well for weeks now, but for the moment both have quieted, and he can rest.

He wakes up to a heavy hand closing around his wrist and a laughing, leering smile in his face, and his body goes cold.

“Found you, you little _bitch_ ,” the guard says with a toothy grin, and cackles when he tries to yank his hand free, throwing himself backwards with all his strength. The attempt is pitiful, and the guard only laughs harder, easily hoisting him into the air. He snarls and kicks and screams, but his efforts are laughable- he has no strength left, after weeks of starvation, and besides, no matter how much of a racket he causes, who would come to help him?

The guard catches the flailing stump that used to be a wrist with his free hand and waves it mockingly. “Didn't learn your lesson the last time, huh? You made that lovely lady at the fruit stand cry…” he trails off, grins sharp and amused. “Well, you won't be doing much thieving after this. But, on the other hand,” he says, pausing to bark a laugh at his own choice of words, “Ha! _On the other hand_ , you just might be pathetic enough to make a living as a beggar!”

The guard doesn't wait for a response, dropping him back to his feet so hard he stumbles, giving him no time to catch his balance before he starts walking back out of the alleyway, strides too long to keep up with, hand still locked around a too-thin wrist, forcing the boy to stumble into a run to avoid being dragged. 

The guard’s partners fall into step on either side at the mouth of the alley, grinning at the sight of him, narrowing the chances of escape to none.

The march to the plaza isn't long, but it's exhausting, and inexorable, and the dread pooling in his stomach makes it feel like forever. He falls, once or twice, and when he does he's dragged, skin scraping raw against the sandy cobbles.

He wants to cry, but refuses to give the guards the satisfaction. He shouts instead, raw and furious, and spits every hateful word he knows. A few people toss sideways looks at the spectacle, some amused and some pitying, but the majority don't look at all, keeping their eyes fixed forward.

He manages to hold back the tears until the stump comes into view, the ancient wood so aged and weathered it's nearly stone, its surface scarred from the wounds of a thousand executioner’s axes. His eyes land on it, and all of a sudden his missing hand is screaming with pain and that horrible absence all over again, just like when he first lost it, and he can't keep himself from crying anymore, despair sinking like a stone in his stomach.

The cursing turns to begging, pleas high and desperate, broken up by wracking sobs, and people begin to gather around, drawn by the commotion, forming a loose ring around the perimeter of the plaza as the guards haul him to the stump. He wants to hate them, but at the moment he can't find it in himself to feel anything at all besides hazy, overwhelming horror.

One of the guards calls out the crime, the verdict, the sentence.

The first scavenger bird has already begun to circle overheard, black silhouette bold against the bright blue sky, its shadow chasing over the sun-bleached cobbles. The birds of the city have long since learned to recognize the patterns that mean blood is soon to spill- the screaming from the plaza, the gathering crowd. He wonders, a touch hysterically, if the same birds that ate his left hand will have his right as well.

A guard grabs him by his shoulders and forces him down, twisting his useless left arm behind his back to hold him in place. Another braces his right arm against the chopping block, one hand pinning his elbow and another just above his wrist. Black spots dance in his vision. His breath is too fast and too shallow, the bandages constricting his chest, and he can’t _breathe_ through the panic.

The third guard raises his axe. The onlookers hush.

There’s the soft swish of air, deceptively gentle, as the axe descends. He closes his eyes against the incoming pain, gritting his teeth so hard they creak, and can only think, desperate and childlike, _please don’t hurt me._

The axe thuds into the ancient wood.

There’s no pain.

For a moment he assumes it’s the shock, the trauma causing the agony to arrive a second delayed, but a second passes, and then another, and there’s still nothing. He can still feel his hand. The guards are talking to each other in low, uncertain voices, saying something he can’t hear over the blood pounding in his ears. They’re not laughing anymore. They sound almost… frightened.

He opens dark eyes, one at a time, and looks.

His arm is still stretched out on the chopping block. It ends at his wrist, where the axe is buried half an inch into the wood. On the other side of the axe is his hand, still curled into a desperate fist. He can still feel his nails digging into his palm.

There’s no blood.

His hand is separated from his arm, and there’s no blood. There’s only a heap of sand, scattered across the weathered surface of the chopping block on both sides of the axe-blade, spilling from the gap in his wrist. It shines like gold dust in the sunlight.

He looks at his clenched fist and, hesitantly, tries to open his fingers.

His fingers obey.

One of the guards takes a hasty step back, mutters something low and shocked and frightened, eyes wide. He barely notices. He twitches his fingers and watches them move. He feels almost giddy, something strange and elated and _powerful_ opening up in his chest.

No one tries to stop him when he lifts his arm up and over the axe-blade, and his hand, attached by nothing at all, moves with it. As soon as his wrist clears the top of the blade, the gap in his wrist fills in, the shifting golden sand knitting the skin back into a perfectly unmarred whole.

A woman at the edge of the watching crowd makes a holy sign with shaking hands.

He holds his hand in front of him, moves it to catch the sunlight. The skin shifts, uneven and rough in a way that skin shouldn’t be, and when he moves it there’s a faint trail of sand, hanging in the air like an echo.

He pushes himself to his feet. The weakness and exhaustion that had plagued him earlier are there still, but they feel faint and distant behind the euphoria pounding in his veins. His skin feels different, light and almost loose on his bones.

The guard- the first one, the one who’d dragged him from the alleyway, the one who _laughed_ \- draws his sword and jabs at the air with it. His face is blotchy white and red with clashing fear and anger, eyes blown wide. “You little thief, what did you _do_?”

He doesn’t answer.

The guard grits his teeth and swings the sword in a fast and savage cut, aiming to slice him open from shoulder to hip. The sword passes through his chest with no resistance at all, as though slicing through water instead of a human body, and comes out the other side trailing a faint trace of sand grains through the air. It doesn’t hurt- doesn’t feel like anything at all.

He grins, and there’s absolutely nothing pleasant about it.

The guard drops his sword and moves as if to run, but two quick steps forward and his hand is snapping up to close around the guard’s wrist, hunger-thin fingers locking into place like a vice, and _oh_ , what a pleasant reversal this is.

The first thought that crosses his mind, as the guard spits venomous words and tries fruitlessly to rip his hand free: he was thirsty, earlier.

The second thought: he’s still thirsty.

The third thought isn’t a thought at all so much as an impulse, a bone-deep and irresistible instinct. He digs his fingers into the guard’s wrist until the man is all but howling, and then he _pulls_.

Starting from the wrist but spreading fast, the guard’s skin _withers_ , deflating and tightening all at once, until it looks more like crumpled paper than skin. The dehydration climbs up the guard’s arm, hungry and grasping, sucking every drop of water out of him, twisting his desperately grasping hand into a small and gnarled claw.

The guard is screaming as the dehydration crawls up his neck, the sound a background noise to the blood pounding in his ears, and he thinks he can hear someone in the crowd vomiting as the man’s face turns to parchment and crumples into a mummified mask. Only once the body is drained dry, reduced to nothing but a husk, does he release his grip, one finger at a time, and let it crumple to the sand.

He turns around, feeling half in a dream, and the spell of horrified fascination pinning the onlookers in place shatters like glass. The bystanders and surviving guards alike flee, scattering down sidestreets and into houses like a flock of startled birds.

Within a minute, he’s alone in the plaza but for the corpse at his feet and the buzzards still wheeling overhead.

The body only barely resembles a body anymore, its withered face still twisted into an echo of that final agonized scream.

Tomorrow, he decides, he’ll leave for the port, and find a ship.

For now, though, he pulls the dead guard’s coin purse off of his belt, and sets off into the city to find himself someplace to eat.

He’s hungry.

**Author's Note:**

> warnings: in-story attempted maiming, pre-story actual maiming, unsafe binding practices, like one instance of misgendering but it goes by super fast, murder by accelerated dehydration, starvation
> 
> i saw [this amazing art](https://laskapsy.tumblr.com/post/165945419888/thief) and went full feral and wrote this within twenty four hours. wish i could muster that kind of inspiration for my secret santa project lmao
> 
> anyways i feel like its... decently clear from the behavior of the people but this isnt set in alabasta, for the record, i just cant picture crocodile not growing up someplace desert-ish, so nameless desert island it is.
> 
> about five hundred words in i realized i didnt have a name for him because crocodile is definitely not his birth name but also he wouldnt be going by that yet, so this turned into a personal challenge of 'can i write a coherent fic without using any name for the main character' and it turns out the answer is yes! he also doesn't have... any actual lines but that's not for any particular reason it just happened that way.
> 
> anyways logia powers are so fucking cool but discovering them after eating the fruit by accident must be a WHOLE trip and a half 
> 
> thanks for reading!
> 
> EDIT: the fantastically talented smartie did [art](https://smarties-art.tumblr.com/post/189742782878/quick-fanart-for-the-fanfic-the-hand-that) for this fic! please go look at it its so good and im losing my whole mind


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